It’s finally over. On Christmas Eve, when exhaustion from long haggling was about to set in, the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared, “We have taken back control of our laws and our destiny”.

Here in America, are we finally beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel?

“The next four to six months could be the worst of the epidemic”, Bill Gates said during an interview recently. With Gates’ prediction and second waves hitting several countries more severely than before, we have, indeed, come to a challenging forefront.

This year has been like no other for digital payments. Even as economies came to a standstill, consumers pivoted to online shopping and businesses turned to remote delivery and digital acceptance.

Despite outwardly being a harmless, jolly, overweight bearded man dressed in red what he was really carrying was not a sack, but ideas and traditions with the potential to corrupt our native identity -- this was the view I absorbed from my family and Bangladeshi community living in Australia three decades ago.

The Academic Experience Project is a faculty-student collaborative work aimed to glean insights about the experiences of tertiary-level students. Each Friday, The Daily Star publishes an op-ed highlighting its findings. This is the eighth article of the series.

A lot of chickens came home to roost this year. The Covid-19 pandemic was not some random thunderbolt from out of the blue, but rather a man-made “natural” disaster, holding up a mirror to so many of our bad habits and dangerous—indeed, lethal—practices.

The Rule of 70, sometimes also referred to as the Rule of 72 or Rule of 69.3, is a method for approximating the number of years it will take for a number to double, given its annual growth rate.

In our work as researchers with the Centre for Peace and Justice (CPJ), BRAC University, we strive to understand refugee community concerns, which we share in turn with the humanitarians and decision-makers.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a collection of 17 interlinked goals designed to be a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all”. The SDGs were adopted in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly and are intended to be achieved by 2030.

During the early months of the Covid-19 global pandemic, almost 400,000 migrant workers were forced to return home, not knowing when the crisis would end or when they would return to their jobs.

In 2020, Nature-based Solutions, or NbS, has emerged as a much-talked-about environmental concept in Bangladesh.

Given the myriad of complex problems of higher education in Bangladesh, it’s a miracle that anyone learns anything inside university classrooms; yet, many graduate and become quite successful. So, would that not be a reason to celebrate the success of the system and of the teachers?

Bangladesh emerged as an independent nation through the unconditional surrender of the Pakistani army to the joint command of Bangladesh and Indian forces on December 16, 1971.

According to the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2019 by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and UNICEF, 89 percent of children (1-14 years) in Bangladesh experienced violent discipline in the month before the survey was conducted.

Turkey is leveraging its successful backing of Azerbaijan’s recent war against Armenia to counter Iran in the Caucasus and gradually challenge Russia in Central Asia, the heart of what Moscow considers its backyard.

The government’s plan, as reported in the media, to reduce the number of coal-based power plants and thus the amount of power to be generated using coal, brings relief to the concerns of environmentalists, scientists and the general public who have been campaigning against major coal use due to the danger it poses to the environment and human health.

This has happened for the first time in Bangladesh’s history. Last week, a group of conscientious citizens called on the President of the Republic to form the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) to investigate allegations of graft and other misdeeds committed by the incumbent Election Commission (EC).

2020 must be one of the toughest years in living memory. In one year, more than 300,000 people died from coronavirus in the United States, more than the number killed in four years of their involvement in the Second World War. World growth is down between 5-7 percent and many millions are struggling with their health, jobs and livelihood. Millions more have been driven below the poverty line.

September’s publication of the IMD Smart City Index 2020 led to the usual flurry of news reports with cities variously preening or wringing their hands at the results, such as Dhaka, Helsinki, and Budapest, to name just a few.